Operation Fast and Furious has risen from the grave

Just a couple of days after Halloween, one of the bloodiest monsters from the Obama Administration’s house of horrors groans and shambles forward, intent on complete the grisly mission that many believe was its true purpose all along. Matt Boyle reports:

Left-wing activists and officials within President Barack Obama’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), part of Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ), attempted this week to reframe Operation Fast and Furious as a problem with America’s gun laws.

“Stricter U.S. gun measures are needed to stem the flow of guns to Mexico, where the weapons are fueling violence and leaving people ‘under siege’ with little hope of help from their government, activists said Thursday,” according to Chad Garland of Cronkite News. “In addition to tougher laws, they called for tougher enforcement by federal officials, who they say have been reluctant to act since the fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, the failed ‘gun-walking’ operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”

Students of Operation Fast and Furious will recall that such cross-border gun crimes were at a fairly low ebb before the Obama Administration decided to dust off a failed Bush-era concept for pushing guns with tracking devices into the hands of criminals, make it ten times larger, and dispense with the tracking devices. The results was more politically useful for the Administration, but pretty rough on the Mexican people, as well as U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Very little in the way of the program’s stated goals have been accomplished; the record of arrests it facilitated is thin. Plenty of the guns remain unaccounted for.

I’ve never believed Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the rest of their crew wanted people to die. That’s a result of their arrogance and incompetence. What they did want was a string of high-profile gun arrests in Mexico, which they could point to as evidence that American gun laws needed tightening in numerous ways – many of which would, of course, have very little connection to the sale of illegal firearms across the border, because that’s how the gun-control movement rolls. On a good day, maybe half of their nostrums have a tenuous logical connection to the events they cite as evidence that no one of good will can argue with them any more.

It’s a bit cheeky of the gun controllers to try resurrecting Operation Fast and Furious at this juncture, with the Administration at a low ebb in popularity. The public nurses growing rage over the ObamaCare debacle, and it’s not hard to see many of the same features in Operation Fast and Furious, including Team Obama arrogantly over-estimating its own abilities, and putting more effort into the post-debacle cover-up than they did into the program itself. This is an exceptionally poor time to remind everyone that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ testimony about ObamaCare sounded an awful lot like Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony on Fast and Furious, right down to the dog-ate-my-homework excuses, claims that a powerful Washington official had no idea what his or her own department was up to, and the abuse of executive power to keep the American people in the dark.